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SEA-ME-WE 3 or South-East Asia - Middle East -
Western Europe 3 is an opticalsubmarine telecommunications
cable linking those regions and is the longest in the world,
completed in late 2000. It is operated by India's Tata Communications and 92 other
investors from the telecom industry. It was commissioned in March
2000 in India.

It is 39,000 kilometres (24,000 mi) in length and uses
Wavelength Division Multiplexing
(WDM) technology with Synchronous Digital Hierarchy
(SDH) transmission to increase capacity and enhance the
quality of the signal, especially over long distances (this cable
stretches from North Germany to Australia and Japan).

According to the cable system network administrator's website,
the system capacity has been upgraded several times. The cable
system itself has two fibre pairs, each carrying (as of May 2007)
48 wavelengths of 10 Gbit/s [1]

Service
disruptions

In July 2005, a portion of the SEA-ME-WE
3 submarine cable located 35 kilometres (22 mi) south
of Karachi that provided Pakistan's major outer
communications became defective, disrupting almost all of
Pakistan's communications with the rest of the world, and affecting
approximately 10 million Internet users.[2][3][4]

On the 26 December 2006 this link severed, causing major
disruption to internet services to and from the Far East. The cause
of this was suspected to be a magnitude 7.1 earthquake off
the coast of Taiwan. It was
stated that the link would take 3 weeks to repair. [5]

On 30 January, 2008 an apparent ship's anchor off Egypt's Alexandria coast is thought to have cut the
newer SEA-ME-WE 4 cable, which is intended to
provide redundancy, causing slow Internet connections and
disruption to international calls to the U.S. and Europe from the
Middle East and South Asia. Over 70 percent of the network in Egypt
was down. Although central to India's largest carrier, Bharat Sanchar Nigam
Limited, the deputy-director general of that organisation said
"Only 10 to 15 percent of our connectivity with the international
gateway faced problems"[6].